Niall Hobhouse to John Kennedy
In the first place, our note on the Manifesto page makes it very clear that competition entrants are under no obligation whatsoever (at any stage of the process) to take the Foreign Office paths as a fixed starting point. This sits uneasily with your feeling that we are being too prescriptive.
A second and related thought concerned the Foreign Office text by which you were so exercised. Putting their piece up was in the spirit of the very open premise of the project itself; we do just put everything there in the hope that people will make something of it when they read it. But I think one shouldn’t make too much of any text written eight years before the project was begun, and as part of a larger architectural manifesto; and I am sure that one should not then treat it in isolation from other later contributions to the site (FOA’s included) which tackle the same issues.
And I have to add: the Eighteenth Century may represent the glory-days of English landscape design, underpinned by a literate and engaged discourse. But the world has changed, even if people seem content now to garden away without benefit of much discussion of what they are doing. Perhaps indeed in the absence of a discourse they are in paradise.
This isn’t facetious; my biggest difficulty is precisely that gardeners want to assert their right to be left alone in their gardens, and who can really blame them?
Gardening itself used to be one of the discernable centres of discussion across the disciplines. But it is every other area of intellectual endeavour that has benefited since then from a kind of convergence between the different fields of enquiry. To take a contemporary example, an architect, an economist or an ethnographer would all of them recognize ‘critical regionalism’ or ‘sustainability’ as useful, indeed overused, sets of ideas relevant to their own fields, and giving them access to ideas in others. Some gardeners might say, reasonably, that these were just abstract concepts that described something they do anyway, and they might be right. It is just that they are denying themselves a far broader world of ideas, which would offer them real clues about the future direction of their patch.
We are now putting up on the site the complete text of the piece on Nature from Keywords, published in 1976. It begins, ‘Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language’; five full pages, as dense and rich-as-treacle. This is merely to demonstrate to gardeners (far better than anything I can do myself) that a hundred other disciplines, in fields bearing much more directly on ‘real’ life, have been wrestling with the dangers, and the opportunities, of the multiple meanings of nature. The gardening world seems to regard nature – both the thing and the idea – as their own special property, and one that is still best discussed in the terms established by Pope and Burke.
On Tesco car parks: surely these are the greatest modern failure of the landscape profession? I’d be very proud if the only contribution of the Hadspen project was to offer an advance in our approach to, and execution of, something so generally awful. I’d like to explore the parallel you suggest.
And I am a bit mystified by the insistence, towards the end of your letter, that garden and landscape should be considered separately. This seems to render what you had been saying of Foreign Office’s written piece irrelevant, at least as a critique of their project. Besides, the 18th Century makes no distinction between the two - it was all garden; what has changed, and when, to make you feel that the two are separate? And is this part of the problem?
Your formula of the gardener ‘creating paradises’ does raise more questions than it answers. It is at once too generic to be useful as a design idea, and too subjectively personal to tell us what it is that a garden designer, in this vicarious role, can actually contribute . Other people’s paradises? And whose – the gardener’s, the owner’s, the visitor’s? Each to his own would serve very well as a motto for most modern gardening practice.
As ever, it is Pope who formulates the problem first and best: ’no public professors of gardening (any more than any public professors of virtue) are equal to the Private practisers of it.’
This question of vicariousness does remain the great unanswered; even, the great unaddressed. I’m astonished by the extent to which this is what this project has been ‘about’, at least so far.
My impression is that landscape and garden designers in private practice, and their clients, are still operating on the model invented by Repton. Clearly a man in the right place at the right time, although one should not understate his pragmatic conservatism as a useful way of inserting himself between a changing market and a public discourse that was a bit out of control. These are moments -Jekyll/Lutyens was another- when the professionals can lead rather than respond, but if only they know what is going on.
Climate change, genetic modification, pressure in Northern Europe for housing (let alone gardening) land, changes in the agricultural intervention regime that make farmers into gardeners, a huge rise in popular gardening and garden visiting, makeover tv……. There is enough in this list to suggest that gardening may be at another such moment of transition.
For six months I have been corresponding with a UK garden designers both on very abstract, and very specific, topics to do with making gardens. And yet these subjects have not been raised.
To be fair, both Noel Kingsbury and Kim Wilkie have mentioned them in conversation; so we may well be talking here as much about the over-literary format of the website itself as about the bunker mentality of the gardenists.
Either way, it is time to move on.
As a positive challenge (and one way that I can illustrate my unease) I will quote Gilles Clements’s proposition from La Sagesse du Jardinier: ’Regarder pourrait etre la plus juste facon de jardinier demain.’
If this turns out to be true, then it changes everything- and for the professional designer first, and most of all. Other Europeans, and the North Americans, seem to have understood the challenge it represents, but I have yet to see any English practitioner even pick it up, let alone respond.
What do you think?